He doesn’t like McChrystal

Tom Englehardt calls McChrystal, our new leader in Afghanistan, the general from the dark side because that’s essentially where he has been for the past five years when he commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which did things we don’t want to know about.

Englehardt sees the recent Obama moves in “Af-Pak” as an all around expansion of the conflict: more troops, more drones, more interference in internal affairs (i.e., Khalilzad as CEO), more war (in Pakistan), more dead and injured civilians, more anti-Americanism.

His conclusion as to where such expansion will take us:

For those old enough to remember, we've been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in -- psychically, if nothing else -- if things don't work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post's Ignatius puts it, cracking the "Taliban coalition" and bringing elements of it to the bargaining table.